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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Style

So here's the deal with Chi. As I said before we're looking at 16 AP (could be more or less--but I want the characters to work at 16 AP) and we start with the basic guy and work out from there.

Here's how it looks

If you scroll down you can see several things.

The first is that the Chi Fighter spends 2 AP and gets extra damage (+2) with every strike but it does NOT add to his A-Cost total. That's a great deal even though the simulator suggests that it isn't worth the blast (I don't believe that--but it's where we are for now).

When we get to the guy paying REA for armor we are somewhat outside of the simulator's ability to simulate. But we've gotten close with some clever manipulation.

Then we get to Round 2, Fight! and "Style." What is that?

Round 2, Fight!
This is an ability to heal a Major Wound's worth of damage and ignore any damage result. This represents a second-wind, if you will.

In the Chi section activating this (or a second one: Round 3, Fight!) will also unlock some more advanced abilities (in this case the Dragon's Breath attack).

Style
There are some problems with charging AP for special moves. For one thing, while someone could theoretically spend all their offensive AP on the move it would make for a bizarre and probably unbalanced character. On the other hand, most of these moves aren't really worth the points even at the reduced AP purchase--and since they do, technically, add to damage, they'd increase A-Cost rather than being reduced.

And how many AP is someone going to pay for Harmonic Palm, anyway if it requires that they pay several AP in order to get the Ignores Armor effect: 2 AP? 3 AP? At that point it's almost definitely not worth the points.

So Style is a way of spending Character Points for Chi moves where the damage is based on your A-Cost (the cost of your otherwise highest attack). We think this'll work and it means that the character does need to "train" to use the moves--which is in keeping with the theory.

This also echoes the classical Magic system where mages spend CPs for spells in some senses.

In this case, each AP buys 4 CP worth of "Style moves" although the character could theoretically spend their own CP as well.

Ramifications
This method breaks some of the rules and conventions but I think it may work pretty well and it will not rely on the character spending small numbers of APs that are, almost certainly, more effectively spent on straight up damage.